When the going gets tough…
The tough get tidying.
I have been making great progress with helping my dad let go. In one session he was persuaded to give up his unread copies of The Edge, a weekly business newspaper. There were copies dating back to 2014, stashed away under a workbench in the patio.
This, along with other old newspapers, made me $11. In Malaysia, you can sell your old paper for recycling.
I like putting things in order because I grew up with parents who had no order in their lives. They just, well, sailed along with the tide and more often than not the boat was upright and the waves were not high.
Last night I had a nightmare. I only dream when I am under stress and yesterday morning my parents quarrelled over a lost blue face towel. I don’t know if one parent really took away the towel or whether the other parent forgot that there actually was one towel instead of two.
In the dream I was in an unknown country lane. My bicycle had broken down and logically I approached one of the houses to ask if I could wait there until a taxi could take me back to wherever it is I had come from.
The landscape was English and the people I spoke to were English. They were unapproachable and unhelpful. In the end I decided to tell them that I didn’t like countryside people because I am a city girl and in the city people were not as suspicious as country folks.
To cut a distressing story short I got into a black cab and ended up somewhere in town. It’s a town in the countryside so it’s not very sophisticated. When I looked at my feet, to my horror my shoes were mismatched. Worse, one shoe was not from Russell and Bromley.
Welcome to my current disordered world where things don’t quite match up.
Just as I think I have found (and tidied up) all the plastic files there are to find, I find a few more boxes tucked away at the back of a shelf.
I just had to start again because things which are the same should always be put together.
You would have thought there are enough plastic files but then on a short foray to the stationary shop, my dad picked up some more. WHY would you do this, I asked, when you already have boxfuls of the stuff?
Oh, I don’t have any purple ones.
I need to bang my head against the wall.
As for the books, it’s like Groundhog Day meets Amazon.com.
Have I seen this book before? Have I seen this book before? Have I seen this book before? Have I seen this book before?
Is this a studyroom or a bookstore? Should I eBay these books? Sell them via Amazon Marketplace? Donate them to a business library?
In the end I decide to stoically attempt to complete what I have set out to do. An orderly life is a valuable life and I don’t want any more dreams about mismatched shoes.
Unfortunately there are so many books, some with multiple copies, that my next nightmare might be about having 10 pairs of shoes but all of the same design and colour.
I will definitely have to organise the books under some kind of system, and I will write about this in my next post.